* July 28, 2008, so called Google killer Cuil launched its search engine. It claimed that their index of 120B documents was 3x that of any search engine. Three days before though, Google announced it knew of 1 trillion URL's.

So what's going on here? Greg's reaction to this was that it was atypical of a market leader to be so reactive to "the competition" (if that's what you call companies that have a minuscule share of the market). He's right. Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop's store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?

I guess the fact that there are zero switching costs for search engines makes their paranoia run a bit higher than most.....

What exactly are you expecting Google to do? Copycatting is one of the driving forces of competition. If one person has a good idea, the other people will take that idea too, forcing a new round of someone being the first to come up with an idea that trumps the others.

The fact that Google can replicate these so easily to me shows that they aren't actually very good or even insightful ideas. And your second example is an idea on how to market, which has been around for ages in various forms of "Mine's bigger than yours."

Very interesting, Mark. One thing I'd point out about your contrast between Google and Walmart is that Sam Walton was actually obsessed with visiting other retailers and trying out things that he saw were working well for others. Store greeters, a company cheer, and the whole concept of a discount club are a few examples of ideas Walmart has taken from other retailers. I'd highly recommend his autobiography, Made in America.

Microsoft has been doing that sort of thing for a long time. And Google has been becoming more like Microsoft in various ways. Once a company gets to be a certain size, and already has lots of eyeballs and dollars flowing their way, and also has an army of smart-but-naive/desperate engineers on staff, it probably gets easier to just copy what other folks are doing. Some manager inside points at something a competitor is doing or has announced, and tells a few engineers to make it happen.

There are other factors, like bureaucratic inertia, that works against that, but still, I think this "me too" factor is a pretty strong reason why it happens. If you have lots of money AND lots of engineers, I think it becomes easier to do either one of the classic "Buy-or-Build" choices.

I can imagine walmart doing wholesale changes to its stores based on mom and pop stores' new features and tacics. It wouldn't be such a good idea if every feature gets copied into all of walmart's stores as soon as it is discovered. But if walmart is consistently watching what's going on in its ecosystem and testing flavored versions of those new tactics in select stores to get feedback and see if this is something they want to do on a larger scale, then hats off to them.

And that is what Google is doing. They are not copying features into the main product. You said it yourself that they are bucket testing or launching seeds of products that may or may not go forward depending on how well the experiment goes for them. And that's a great strategy to follow if you have the resources for it.

Because Google programmers have a certain amount of eh.. 'free programming-project time' each week, it's also very likely that when they spot these neat features, one of their programmers have already been experimenting with an implementation (cause, of course, the programmers spot and like cool features too :) I'd guess a lot of the time, they just have to develop an integrate a pre-existing project, which puts them in a very good position to quickly play catch-up.

I have always been curious what would happen if there was a grass roots movement for people to switch their default browser to say yahoo for a week. What kind of chaos would occur with Google's bottom line? Although switching costs are not high, inertia is very high so this is completely theoretical until a new search site grabs peoples attention.